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As you may be aware the Customer Services team have started running monthly ‘How to… Events’ based on our most frequently asked questions (FAQs). We run these events at different times during the week to try and talk to as many students as possible. We try to have a Librarian and Library Advisor on each day and sometimes staff from other sections have kindly volunteered to help out too. We advertise these events through various means from posters around the library to social media and of course through our Communications Coordinator – Stewart.

Getting Started

The first event theme was ‘Getting Started’ where we explained to students what their library borrower number and PIN are, how to use the catalogue to search for books and how to use the MFDs. Luckily for us at Curzon, Steve Saunders (Uniflow Systems Administrator) kindly volunteered to help too, he proved invaluable and had lots of students asking questions about printing.

Using more than books

The second event was based on ‘Using more than the books on the library shelves’. This was to explain to students that there are a lot more resources available to them, than just the books on the shelves. Many student browse the shelves and miss out on all the ‘other stuff’. We explained about searching the catalogue to find books using keywords, how to reserve books that were already out on loan. We also demonstrated how to search Summon to find journal articles. Kip (Supervisor, Inter-library Loans) was also there to tell students how to obtain material that they could not access via the library tile (ILL).

Studying over Christmas

The December event was all about ‘Studying over Christmas’ explaining how the library remains open over the vacation for them to be able to come in and study if they wanted to. We also promoted SCONUL access, so they could use other university libraries, if they were going home for Christmas. This event was very popular as a lot of our students did not know that the library stayed open over vacations and surprisingly very few knew about SCONUL.

I really enjoy running these events and take great delight in engaging with our customers who are always grateful of any information that will help them with their studies. We need to carry on spreading the word about all our wonderful services, resources and most importantly our staff who are always there willing to help in any way that they can.

We will be running even more events in 2018 from ‘study spaces’ to ‘coping with exams’. We hope these prove as popular as those already run or even better exceed our expectations.